“I think I got some good pictures today,” Ada said, staring up at the night’s sky as they walked back to their cars. “Damn, the stars are beautiful.”
“Oh, yeah?” Alonzo mumbled, without a single ounce of care for those pictures or how the sky looked tonight because he was far too preoccupied with her.
“I won’t know ‘til I develop them, but I can feel it when I get a good one. No, a great one.” Her voice was soft and wistful, and it drifted up into the air like those tendrils of smoke. It was dark enough that even with him being so close, some of her features were in shadow. Still, Ada’s silhouette took Alonzo’s breath away.
“Can you?” His voice was hoarse with need, and his heart was thumping against his chest. “Can you really feel it?”
Ada turned to him. He could feel her questioning gaze more than he could see her eyes, just like he could hear the smile in her voice more than he could see it on her face. “You sleeping in your car again?” she asked.
Alonzo looked away, embarrassed. “Uh, yeah. I should have asked at the motel this morning if they had any rooms. I didn’t think.”
“Wouldn’t have mattered. They don’t. You could stay on the fairgrounds. Lots of people are.”
“Uh, no thanks. That’s not really my type of scene.”
Ada’s shoulder brushed his, and he turned to her again. “You wanna stay with me?”
His eyes widened, and his mouth dropped open. “What? I mean…what?”
Her laughter was featherlight. “I do have two beds,” she reminded him. “It’s not a huge sacrifice.”
“Are you sure?” They’d arrived at Ada’s car and turned to face one another. Ada leaned against her car casually, but Alonzo’s stomach was tied in knots.
“Wouldn’t have offered if I wasn’t,” she said.
That didn’t help ease the tension in his body, and her answer made him remember her admonition this morning about asking a direct question to get a direct answer. “Okay. Well, yes, I’d like that. Thank you.”
She shrugged. “No problem. Meet you there?”
Alonzo nodded eagerly and started to turn away.
“Alonzo.”
He lifted his head and met her eyes again. “Ada?”
She licked her lips and ran a hand just over the top of her afro as if steeling herself. “You can have the spare bed if you want, or…”
Alonzo’s eyes were wide again, and those knots in his stomach were now knotting on top of themselves. “Or?”
She clearly heard the way his voice shook, and it made her smile. Of course. “Or you can—”
2010
“No,” Amir said, standing abruptly from his chair and reaching for Alonzo’s empty bowl.
“Absolutely not,” Amaya echoed, handing her bowl to her brother. She pushed up from her seat while shaking her head vigorously. “Not at all.” She grabbed the cobbler container and followed Amir to the kitchen.
Alonzo sat back in his chair, laughing hard enough to bring tears to his eyes. While his children cleared the table and washed up, he sat, smiling, staring at the empty chair next to him, thinking of Ada, but not as she’d been in that chair for all the years when this house had been theirs. No, Alonzo crossed his arms over his chest and rested his chin against his left shoulder and thought of Ada as she’d been that night: young, bold but still a little bit nervous, and even more beautiful than every star in the sky.
1967
“Or you can stop waiting for me to make all the moves,” Ada said. Her eyes were dark pools in an already dark night. Her gaze bored into him, challenging and beseeching at the same time.
She was nothing but contradictions, and Alonzo couldn’t get enough of every one of them. He’d never met anyone like Ada Carr in his life, and he knew now how empty all those days he’d passed before her had been. He hadn’t lived an easy life. It had been fuller in some ways than others, but in this moment, Alonzo could only think of all those days before as lacking. Ada made everything else dim in comparison.
He took a step forward and then another, his breath slow and shallow, his pulse a pounding bass line. But every step was easier than the last because every step brought him closer to her. When he was close enough to hear the slightly dry wheeze of Ada’s breath but not close enough to press his body against hers, he stopped.
Her mouth wilted into the prettiest petulant pout.
“That enough moves for you?” he breathed.
She tilted her head back, raised her nose and chin into the air in challenge. “No,” she said before he could even fully ask the question.
Alonzo moved his hands slowly, giving them both enough time to anticipate what was coming. The spark of electricity when his fingertips landed on her waist. When he squeezed her flesh, they both shuddered.
And then there was the melody of her moaning sigh.
The bass of his gulping swallow.
Their hitched breaths as he gripped her and pulled her the rest of the way to him. She pressed, and he pulled, and when her body crushed against his, it was like a needle scratching the world. Everything around them came to a gaping, silent stillness.
“Are you always this careful?” she breathed against his chin, tilting her head back in invitation.
“You got a problem with that?” He whispered the question against her top lip, dry skin catching on dry skin.
She licked her lips. Their lips. “A bit, but I can work around that. Just need to know what I’m in for.”
Alonzo shook his head. Their mouths brushed together. “I don’t even know what I’m in for,” he said and then pressed his mouth to Ada’s. He swiped his tongue across the seam of her lips.
Her mouth opened on a breathy laugh. “Good. You seem like the kind of man who needs to be shaken up every now and then.” She breathed those words into his mouth.
He tilted his head back and smiled.
She frowned.
“Is that what you’re gonna do, Ada? Shake me up?”
She cupped the back of his head and pulled his mouth back to hers. “Haven’t I already?”
He answered by kissing her again, and this kiss was better than the last. This kiss was art. It was a second encore in a hot, sweaty club where every note made your pulse quicken and took you to a new plane.
As far as Alonzo was concerned, kissing Ada Carr was like hearing a song for the first time and knowing it would change his life because she already had.